


unsaid

by foundCarcosa



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-25
Updated: 2017-03-25
Packaged: 2018-10-10 09:40:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10434882
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foundCarcosa/pseuds/foundCarcosa
Summary: They knew the truth but wouldn't speak it-- at least not to each other.





	

Howard Stark had instilled good, wholesome values into his only son: trust your government, buy American, and always take the woman to a restaurant rated four stars or higher in the Zagat Surveys. --Well, Zagat hadn’t been established then. But if Howard Stark had been around in the eighties, he would have said that, without question.

What he hadn’t prepared Tony for — what he would have _never_ prepared Tony for — was what to do when the woman was a man.

* * *

“Ain’t nothing wrong with being a little… _funny,_ if that’s what you wanna do,” James Rhodes’ father used to say, with that twitch of his cheek that spoke otherwise. “Just don’t bring it anywhere near me and mine.”

There isn’t anything _funny_ about the fact that Jamey, as his friends called him then, has to hide the fact that he went stag to the prom because no girl would let herself be seen with the boy who’d been witnessed getting a little too close to the school’s token fruit. There isn’t anything funny about coming home most evenings with bruises and shiners that _didn’t_ come from football practice, like he claimed they did. There isn’t anything funny about escaping to the Marines — because the toughest men were in the Marines, and if he was a Marine no one would _care_ if he liked the hole or the pole — and finding out the hard way that people _did_ care, and people cared a _lot,_ and keeping his mouth shut became even more of a priority despite the loneliness that ate him alive.

And there isn’t a damn thing funny about being saved by, and then thanked by, and then offered a job serving the most disarming and most damaging man he’d ever met.

* * *

"So, Rhodey, just out of curiosity. What kind of chicks do you go for? This whole time we’ve been friends, I still don’t know your type.”

“Uh. I just… I don’t think I really have a type. You know?”

“Yeah. Yeah, me neither. What an odd coincidence, huh?”

* * *

Chemical poisoning eats at Tony, and something else eats at his best friend. They snap at each other, sarcastic barbs cutting deeper than knives. Sometimes they push, punch, grapple. After, Rhodey sits on the couch with his head in his hands, gripping his skull and digging nails in; Tony kicks things over in the lab and barks irritably at DUM-E; both men wishing for different results but too afraid to fight for them.

Rhodey pushes himself off the couch, grabs his bomber jacket. Tony glimpses the movement, hesitates, then darts out of the lab.

“Hey. Wait.”

“See you Monday. Bright and early. Business as usual, right?” Rhodey’s punching his arms into his jacket and Tony winces, tugs at his hair, stammers as he frantically combs his internal database for Words That Will Close The Rift Between Them but finds that particular file folder empty.

“Please. Don’t… I’ll order pizza. We’ll, uh. Watch the game. It’ll be fine. Just. Don’t…”

“Don’t what.” Rhodey stops, although his back is still turned. His chest feels tighter than ever, but so close to loosening, so close, if Tony would just _say_ it for once.

“Don’t…” Tony swallows, exhales, but the words, so urgent and so insistent in his mind, won’t spill forward. “Rhodey, listen, _please…”_

"Can’t you, for _once_ in your miserable life, say something that hasn’t been fed to you by someone else? Don’t _what?”_

Tony fists his hands in his hair and grits his teeth. “Don’t… leave. Don’t leave me, stay here, okay, just... just _stay…”_

Once he says it he can’t stop saying it, even as Rhodey sheds his jacket and crosses the room and enfolds him in the embrace he so desperately wanted.

And even so, even with this, Rhodey still fails to muster his own courage, to kiss Tony’s tears away.

* * *

"Hello, Mr Rhodes.”

Rhodey swallows, but the lump that has settled into his throat ever since he got the call doesn’t dissipate. “JARVIS.”

“It has been sixteen days. I have monitored all of the news networks, and calculated the chances—”

“I know, JARVIS.”

“Then you will know that I have been given specific instructions to be executed in the event of Mr Stark’s demise.  
This was, for a reason unknown to me, not one of them.”

The hollow shell of Tony’s home is again full of Tony — a holographic image that still manages to be larger than life, larger than _death_ now. He is working on something, and idly talking to JARVIS.

 _"James Rhodes. James_ Rupert _Rhodes. God. With a name like that, his father must have hated him more than mine hated me. …He’s cute, though. In a very… law-abiding sort of way. Know what I mean?”_

_"I do not.”_

_“Of course you don’t. I bet you like chicks too. Like that Svedka vodka bot. You like that? …I mean, I do like girls. Most of the time. But…  
Anyway, back to Rhodes. --Rhodey, right, he likes Rhodey. Well, he can be my roadie any day. Ha! Good one, Tony, good one.” Tony pauses, looking up and into the distance. “My roadie. My Rhodey. …You think he’d object to me making that pun? Is it too… too much? Yeah, it's terrible, isn't it? Ugh. --Come on, JARVIS, help me out. You know I’m socially wrecked.”_

_"I am unsure of what you are asking me.”_

_“I know. You haven’t even met him. But you know, as they say — to know him is to love him. At first sight, or something.  
Ew, that's gross. Gag. I know. Anyway, you’ll see.”_

There is more, much more, conversations with JARVIS that no one else was there to witness, drunken singing, drunken crying… all of it about _Rhodey, his Rhodey,_ and the lump in Rhodey’s throat that has been there since he got the call is swelling behind his clenched teeth and tight lips, swelling behind his burning eyes, swelling in his aching chest.

_"One day I’m going to die. You know that, JARVIS? I mean, it sounds ridiculous, I know, but it’s going to happen. And I don’t want to die without having told him. I… I really don’t…”_


End file.
